“You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.”

Eric Hoffer

philosopher

OTTAWA—Next weekend, as Liberals are filing into their convention in Montreal, Conservatives plan to be staked out in the corridors with cameras.

They will be trying to snap photos of senators entering the big party gathering, so they can shoot holes in leader Justin Trudeau’s declaration of a few weeks ago: “There are no more Liberal senators.”

This tactic is among several laid out in a strategic planning memo from the Conservatives that fell into the Star’s hands this week.

The Conservatives also hope to capture some photos of Trudeau posing for photos — to show that the leader isn’t interested in policy discussions.

Now that this tactic has been exposed, it does raise the slapstick possibility of a snap-happy camera war at the convention: Liberals taking photos of Conservatives taking photos of Trudeau posing for photos.

Welcome to political warfare in the digital age.

It isn’t often that the media gets such a detailed look at political planning documents, especially from the notoriously secretive Conservative party. Thanks to this windfall of memos, we now have a clearer look at how Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s party intends to hold on to power after the 2015 election.

There’s an old saying that the means you use to get power aren’t the same methods that will keep you there, but Harper’s Conservatives have turned that advice on its head by governing in permanent campaign mode.

The Fair Elections Act, unveiled earlier this month, is increasingly looking like the “All’s Fair” election law, as the experts take a magnifying glass to the hundreds of clauses buried in the 242 pages of legislation.

The memos and slide show received by the Star this week are very much a companion piece to those 242 pages — taken together, a multiple-volume manual on the Conservatives’ political machine.

True to their free-market philosophy, the Conservatives have tried to make sure that their most important political assets remain unregulated: advertising, their database, their outreach efforts with the “base.”

While their planning documents are packed with strategies on advertising and loading the party’s Constituent Information Management System (CIMS database) in advance of the 2015 vote, the Fair Elections Act makes no effort to keep the playing field open, transparent or level on this score.

Under the proposed law, if you have donated $20 or more to the Conservative party in the past five years, the party can get in touch with you without having to document the cost of that effort as a bona fide election expense.

There’s another bit of wisdom, less frequently cited, which is useful to keep in mind when reading the Conservative memos. It comes from the late U.S. philosopher Eric Hoffer and it advises: “You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.”

Now, no one is suggesting that the Conservatives are afraid of cameras, but their planning around the Liberal convention is riddled with mentions of “disunity.” To really frighten the Liberals, the Conservatives believe they have to portray the party as divided and fractious.

Granted, the Liberals have done a bang-up job of painting that picture for themselves over the past decade or two, but if Hoffer is correct, then disunity is a scary prospect to Conservatives as well.

It’s no doubt why the Conservatives scrambled to whisper to journalists that the leak of documents to the Star was an outside job, not the work of a “mole” inside.

Yet this week also produced signs — in the documents and elsewhere — that everything isn’t sunshine and harmony inside Conservative ranks.

There was the rather public spectacle of Finance Minister Jim Flaherty appearing to be offside with the Prime Minister on the matter of income-splitting and the bizarre sight of him sitting on the sidelines in Question Period the day after budget day.

In one of the Conservative election planning memos, the party reports that it has spoken with every member of the Conservative caucus about his/her intentions to run for re-election in 2015 — with one exception: “The only one who has not made himself available is Minister (Jason) Kenney.”

Kenney, it’s worth remembering, has been showing an extraordinary amount of independent-mindedness these past few months, departing from the Conservative chorus demonizing former Harper chief of staff Nigel Wright and publicly declaring that Mayor Rob Ford should step down.

Then there’s this bit in the minutes of a Conservative meeting: “We need to rebuild confidence with caucus from the PMO and HQ (party headquarters.)”

These are hints that the PMO-Senate scandal has taken a toll on party spirits and unity; that the heavy-handed governing style exposed by the controversy comes at a price.

No wonder, then, that when Conservatives were trying to dream up ways to frighten their enemies, the picture of senators came to mind.

Susan Delacourt is a member of the Star’s parliamentary bureau.

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